A few remarks about spamming bots …

August 29th, 2011, 17:10

They're content with a link in their bio page for link farming. Most likely they've sold that "service" to gullible webmasters.

I had tons of those until I changed the phpbb captcha from 'copy that image' to what is 10-3+5?' Not entirely foolproof, but only one suspicious signup since. Until they update their bots to grade level arithmetics that is :-)

Yes. That seems to be the best (or at least one of the best) methods for now. Or *really* complicated captchas.

I'm sad that the official forums of the German publisher dtp are almost "overrun" by spamming-bots. And no-one from the company seems to care.
All moderators there are volunteers.
And there is only one real "community rep" there right now.

—  Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius  and a lot of courage  to move in the opposite direction. (E.F.Schumacher, Economist, Source)

Found at the forums of dtp (German Publisher of the Drakensang games) :

Recommend !!!!

von BeE56d144E7A4E0 » 24.09.2011, 21:26
Hey!
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I would appreciate your advice!

That spam bot has actually invaded sites from all continents, as it appears to me.

—  Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius  and a lot of courage  to move in the opposite direction. (E.F.Schumacher, Economist, Source)

"User" 'smill' seems to have found a delicate time window to spδm around in the forums.
If the location is right (Shanghai), then we might need a few more spδm-squatters from that time zone.

—  Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius  and a lot of courage  to move in the opposite direction. (E.F.Schumacher, Economist, Source)

—  Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius  and a lot of courage  to move in the opposite direction. (E.F.Schumacher, Economist, Source)

Warning ! There seems to come a new wave of spammers rolling through forums !

Theresh_Lila spammed the forum of the TDE license holders full with 29 entries within an quarter of an hour !

One thread even contained 13 ( ! ) continuous entries of spam one directly after the other !

Fields translated by me, names are original :

Teresh_Lila
Locked

Letzte Aktivitδt: Heute 12:07

Biography Man
Place of living Modiin
Interests Teresh_Lila
Profession South Solon

—  Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius  and a lot of courage  to move in the opposite direction. (E.F.Schumacher, Economist, Source)

—  Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius  and a lot of courage  to move in the opposite direction. (E.F.Schumacher, Economist, Source)

Originally Posted by Alrik Fassbauer
Ah, yes, I have already expected this.

In a few cases, they even post normal posts with absolutely no spam in them - the spam is in their signature or even only in their biio page (Fielsd "homepage", for example )

Ah that makes a lot of sense since they have shifted to selling "Search Engine Optomiszation" anyways so all they care about is that the keywords their john pays them to use and their url are up and somewhere google-indexed. If that includes some sites user profiles, that's a pretty sneaky way to do it without getting noticed as quickly.

Thankful the staff here manage to keep it under control without having to use the robots.txt exception for the whole forums. That can help a lot, but it's kind of convenient not having it.

Yes, some even do serious posts - and in the poster's bio you can find links. Or, the thread's tags just contain links.

—  Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius  and a lot of courage  to move in the opposite direction. (E.F.Schumacher, Economist, Source)

Originally Posted by jhwisner
Ah that makes a lot of sense since they have shifted to selling "Search Engine Optomiszation" anyways so all they care about is that the keywords their john pays them to use and their url are up and somewhere google-indexed. If that includes some sites user profiles, that's a pretty sneaky way to do it without getting noticed as quickly.

Worry not, we're wise to that scam. We've seen an increase in that sort of thing, but thankfully the Watch hasn't seen a full-on assault to date.

Originally Posted by jhwisner
Thankful the staff here manage to keep it under control without having to use the robots.txt exception for the whole forums. That can help a lot, but it's kind of convenient not having it.

Corwin and I prefer the personal touch as we maintain our "forum nazi" labels.

— Sorry. No pearls of wisdom in this oyster.
Dallas Cowboys: Great Season! / / Detroit Red Wings: Another rollercoaster this year?

OK so the new spam bots are kind of an interesting evolution over the last generation. There's one, fengzi597, which created user profiles on something like 100+ forums remotely related to gaming. It's posted roughly 25 posts in each of them so far - they seem topical and like they're actually part of the conversations to a degree. All the posts it puts up with links though appear to be a set of identical spam advertisements for various F2P browser games.

I'm really not sure if this is a spamming bot or 50 guys with the same username manually doing the spamming to a degree. If it's a bot then I they beat the Turing test maybe.

I've actually foreseen this development a few years ago, because imho that's the only way to get real attention nowadays. For including spam.

My perception is that probbly the next few leaps in AI development will come from spammers - as you already observed : Getting a spam bot to infiltrate a forum will become the ultimative Turing-Test.

The other possibility is to actually "buy" Chinese workers for doing that. And I hope that everyone here already knows that article from the British newspaper The Guardian about corrupt Chinese prison "heads" who are forcing prison inhabitants to farm gold for wow …

Besides, about fengzi597 : I always find it odd that

a) the real name posted in the profile doesn't match the forum's name at all
b) a person posts the real name in a forum profile at all …

—  Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius  and a lot of courage  to move in the opposite direction. (E.F.Schumacher, Economist, Source)

He's still passing the RPGCodex version of the turing test for the moment at least (and game banshee, and ign, and eurogamer, and knitting-fanatics, etc.). It's actually kind of hilarious though - this one is pretty much everywhere and has been succesfully using its scripts for about 2-3 months.

Your spambot has to have some big digital cajones to post in an admin created thread titled "Concerning SPAM Messages!" Now that's kind of funny.

Our company has years of experience producing fake passports and other identity documents. We use high quality equipment and materials to produce counterfeit passports. All secret features of real passports are carefully duplicated for our falsified documents.
We are the best producer of quality fake documents. With over 3million of out documents circulating over the world.

—  Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius  and a lot of courage  to move in the opposite direction. (E.F.Schumacher, Economist, Source)

Sounds to me almost like a bot retrieving member names from here, adding a semicolon sign between them, adding a few words, and adding a link. Kind of a "proof of concept" that a bot is actually capable of doing this - and of sending private messages, too.

Or could this be a real person knowing you from another forum where you all are or were active, too ? If so, "Hello and bye" sounds to me like "I have seen you" or like "gotcha", perhaps even trying to create a feeling of being watched or followed. Or both.

Has anyone tried that youtube-like link ?

—  Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius  and a lot of courage  to move in the opposite direction. (E.F.Schumacher, Economist, Source)